Simon Jenkins: Londoners pay a price for too much VIP protection

Citizens cope with burglaries and muggings while police vie to carry guns around royalty, peers and former PMs

Tuesday 10 September 2013 13:02 BST

A man in a suit wanders a London garden at six in the evening. He is accosted by a pair of policemen. In the old days they would have said: “Good evening, sir, can we help you? A little lost, are we?”

But this is Cameron’s kingdom. The constables draw their guns (this is contested) and scream, one to “put your hands up”, the other to “lie on the ground”. Prince Andrew, known to be a bit slow on the uptake, finds these contrasting tasks hard to perform. Instead he goes mad with fury. He must be lucky to be alive.

Two days earlier and just across the lawn, another man is banging about the Queen’s state rooms with a fire extinguisher in search of the crown jewels. Here the police are less vigilant, perhaps because Motorway Cops was on TV at the time, and he has to smash an entire door down to get noticed. That a manic depressive wandering the palace with a fire extinguisher is regarded as normal while someone strolling in the garden merits an armed response indicates the bizarre mindset of London’s now rampant securocrats.

I am beginning to think the safest way to wander round London is dressed as a policeman, waving a machine gun and ranting at passers-by. Tourists should be told that this is an old English tradition, like clog-dancing. We should also tell them that palaces are naturally haunted by depressives hurling fire extinquishers, while London bobbies have long used dispensable heirs to the throne for target practice.

The truth is that the city of Westminster must have more weapons on parade than anywhere outside the compound of Kim Jong-Un. Parliament’s environs are an al Qaeda assault course. Downing Street looks like a set for the last days of the Führerbunker. If tourists to Washington can visit Congress or the White House tended only by civilians, why does the British Parliament need an army of paramilitary police? It is humiliating.

Paranoia has become a London epidemic, one that is hard to challenge since security has all the best tunes. But security is like a painkiller. The more you take, the less effective it becomes. A guard who cannot recognise the person he is guarding cannot be a reliable guard. Police so plentiful they cannot recognise fellow police — as those crowding Westminster cannot possibly do — will not recognise imposters.

A former London police chief, Lord Blair, yesterday claimed that it was “impossible to make any site completely secure”. It seems equally impossible to judge what constitutes “less than completely”, and where that boundary should be fixed. Indeed it was impossible even to work out who should do the fixing. This week there is no clarity on who was responsible for the antics at Buckingham Palace, the Police Commissioner, the Mayor or the Home Secretary. Divided accountability is no accountability at all. It means buck-passing and risk aversion.

As every Londoner knows, policing London’s streets is now concentrated on traffic offences, because that is where the money lies. With taxes capped, boroughs can raise extra revenue only from drivers. Westminster gets almost £80 million from parking offences, more than from council tax. It gets nothing from safer high streets or recovered property. Residential neighbourhoods are patrolled only by the occasional screaming police car. As a result, richer areas of the capital must now pay for their own security guards. Boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea are archipelagos of gated communities, stripped of all street life and vitality.

The one group that gets a first-class service from the police is VIPs. Peers of the realm are welcomed to the House of Lords by machine gun-toting guards. Ambassadors are welcomed to their offices by uniformed officers. Tony Blair’s front door, and his back one, are protected by the Met’s finest armour, day and night, at our expense. Some £130 million is spent each year on this marginal policing activity.

I am all for the royal family, and long may it reign. But the extravagance of its protection is beyond reason. The Changing of the Guard — staged daily for tourists — is apparently so dangerous that an army of policemen must be deployed to guard the soldiers themselves. It must be time to hire actors to perform this onerous task and let soldiers get on with what they were trained for: fighting.

When Cameron came to office he is said to have objected to the police racing him around town flanked by the whistling outriders and Zil lanes beloved of the Blairs. The truth is that VIP protection and weapons proficiency are coveted and well-paid jobs at the Met. Protection command is a force within a force. Any suggestion that it might be slashed meets furious resistance and threats of “the risk to the monarch”. The tabloid press laps up such nonsense, terrifying politicians into conceding each new upward twist of the security ratchet.

Any buildings as large and high-profile as Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament are bound to attract the occasional nutcase and even a risk of more severe attack. But the same goes for railway stations, museums and skycrapers. It is not VIPs who have been killed by terrorists over the past three decades but ordinary Londoners. It is not VIPs who suffer muggings, burglaries and car crime. It is ordinary Londoners who must take the rough with the smooth of living in the capital.

London spends large sums on VIP security, more intrusive and visually offensive than in any other capital I know. Important people are entitled to some protection. That entitlement should come with expecting them to accept some degree of risk. As for Buckingham Palace, I have always thought its garden should be opened to the public when the Queen is not in residence. That would at least make the police less jumpy.